Maybe it's the fact that Walden Pond in 1845 was a hangout for "homeless people, alcoholics and Irish immigrants." Maybe it's that Henry David Thoreau put a chair on his porch, inviting company. Maybe it's that New England in those years was at the height of its deforestation and that the place where Thoreau built his cabin was a woodlot owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"A woodlot," Robert Sullivan said. "Setting up a camp on a woodlot is like setting up a camp at a gas station on Burnside."

His book isn't intended to "myth-bust" Thoreau, Sullivan said. That's already been done. "The common myth that's busted is that he was a cheat, that he really didn't live alone in the woods but went back to town all the time. I'm kind of out to myth-bust the myth-busters."

Try saying that three times without taking a breath. If you did, Thoreau would enjoy it. He was a gregarious man, beloved by his friends and an enthusiastic dancer. He was not reclusive, was not an anarchist and above all did not believe in a division between a pristine natural world off-limits to all but a few and an urban world that was inherently compromised. He was a Transcendentalist, someone who believed nature should be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone, and a city-dweller who spent time on Staten Island before his years at Walden Pond.

"He's always misconstrued as a separatist," Sullivan said. "He never was. It's a false distinction between natural and non-natural, and I think that divide has hurt us down through the years. What Thoreau was all about is community."

Thoreau has been analyzed and over-analyzed for more than a century, and everything from the garden he grew to his sexuality has been the subject of much speculation. His influence on modern leaders, particularly Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., is immense, and the idea of writing something fresh on Thoreau was daunting.

"My one area of expertise is freelance writing," Sullivan, a contributing editor to Vogue magazine, said, "so I wrote about him as a professional freelance writer, which he was."

Sullivan's career includes five previous books that explore (myth-myth-busting) Thoreauvian themes -- including "The Meadowlands,""A Whale Hunt" and "Rats" -- and several years in Portland, which explains his knowing reference to Burnside Street. He spent some time at Walden Pond, which is unimpressive to those expecting a verdant shrine. It's nice enough but looks a like a landfill (there's one nearby) and is sometimes strewn with refuse. "Littered with ideas," is how Sullivan puts it.

Sullivan reads from "The Thoreau You Don't Know" at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 22, at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.